Wings Over Scotland

A particularly alert reader contacted us this morning with an observation so subtle it had totally escaped us, even though we’d seen both the things in question.

On last night’s BBC News at Six, the lead story – taking up over six minutes of the 30-minute show – was a steep 4.1% rise in English rail fares. The in-depth piece explicitly noted (at 5m 45s) that Scottish rail users would have a lower rise, saying “Passengers in Scotland will be better off, with season tickets capped at the rate of inflation” and also noting that no rises were planned in Northern Ireland and the decision in Wales was still to be made.

Reporting Scotland, immediately afterwards, took a different angle.

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A quick update on how mainstream media coverage of our poll is going.

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Sweet mercy. We’ve been pretty scathing about the Scottish media over the last few days, but we had no idea that our jibes about the Scotsman in particular now being a spoof site were so literally true.

The image above comes from the Scotsman’s editorial leader accompanying its ridiculous Nate Silver decoy story this morning. We’ve highlighted a line for you.

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We had a listen to Radio Scotland this morning again. We only caught the end of Good Morning Scotland, but we were still in time to catch them cramming in a piece on today’s comedy Scotsman headline about American psephologist Nate Silver and his vague, generalised comments about polling.

With an absolutely straight face (so far as you can tell on radio, anyway), the GMS presenter asked Silver for his view on “how well the media handles statistics”, while carefully steering the discussion in such a way that neither Silver nor fellow live guest Professor John Curtice had any opportunity to refer to the Panelbase poll commissioned by this site and published last week.

(We have no idea if either of them would have had any desire to, but the presenter’s questions carefully closed off any avenues which might have offered the chance.)

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(No, that’s not a reference to David McLetchie, who was by all accounts a very decent chap and a sad loss to the world of Scottish politics, whatever your persuasion.)

We’ve made a couple of slight changes to this front cover from tomorrow’s Scotsman. Amazingly, neither of them is the headline story. That one, hilariously, is all real.

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The Scottish media has adopted a uniform silence over the results of last week’s Panelbase poll. We can simply accept that, or we can stand up and challenge it.

The BBC is funded by a compulsory tax, enforced by law. You pay for it to serve you. If you think it’s been abdicating its duty, why not ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” (presented by stand-in Louise Smith) this morning from 8.50am – lines actually open at 8am – and let them know how you feel about it?

By phone: 0500 92 95 00
By text: 80295
By email: callkaye@bbc.co.uk

Please be polite. If you call but don’t get on, or your text or email isn’t used, please tell us in the comments section below. (In the case of text or email, include a copy.)

George Orwell, “The Freedom Of The Press”, 1943:

“‘If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.‘”

We hear you, George.

When we commissioned our poll, we were about 50/50 in terms of whether the mainstream media would cover it. When the results came in, we cautiously shifted to 60/40 in favour. No matter how piqued the press was about this site’s scrutiny of it for the last year and a half, we reasoned, these results were dynamite and surely couldn’t be ignored by any journalist with a shred of conscience or dignity.

Who would have thought that we, of all people, could be guilty of so over-estimating the integrity and professionalism of Scotland’s newspapers and broadcasters?

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A series of super-short snippets from our splendid survey.

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VOTERS WHO EXPRESS ANY OPINION ON MEDIA BIAS

Men: 60%
Women: 37%

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We thought we might as well take advantage of an excellent new facility revealed to us by an alert reader last night, whereby we can now link you to permanent full copies of web pages without directing traffic to the website in question or faffing around with awkward and flaky things like Google Cache.

Unsurprisingly totally ignoring yesterday’s dramatic poll revelations, the Scotsman’s big political story this morning is “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall throwing a barely-believable playground tantrum about Alex Salmond saying some words that Mr McDougall likes to say.

You can read it, without earning the Scotsman any undeserved ad revenue, here.

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One of the scary things about the decline in print newspaper sales is the mutability of online media. If you rely on digital versions of news stories for reference, it’s impossible to be sure that the paper you buy will be the paper you own tomorrow.

The most spectacularly ironic demonstration of the principle was when Amazon deleted copies of “1984” – a book whose central character spends his life doctoring and falsifying old newspapers for propaganda reasons – from customers’ Kindles without their knowledge a few years ago, showing that even content stored on your own device rather than on a publisher’s website wasn’t totally safe, and could be fiddled with or even taken away entirely, silently, from thousands of miles away.

But nowadays you can read three radically different versions of a story on a newspaper in a single day, all from clicking the same external link, with the whole process conducted in full public view, and almost nobody bats an eyelid.

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